Players are always complaining about various features of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and addressing the developers. However, a former developer has now spoken up and said: “Developers have frustratingly little influence.” Also concerning matchmaking.
What feature is being discussed? This refers to “Skill-based Matchmaking,” or SBMM for short. Players have suspected this to be a system for player matchmaking in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for a while, even though matchmaking works differently than you think.
What is the problem with SBMM? SBMM ensures that players are matched with others based on their abilities. This means: If you play well, you will be matched with better players. If you play poorly, you will be matched with worse players.
In reality, the system leads to players having to exert themselves in every match and not being able to just play “relaxed.” Every round requires their maximum effort.
To circumvent this, some strong players even engage in “reverse boosting”. They intentionally die frequently to have poor stats so that they can match with inexperienced beginners or relatively bad players.
However, since they themselves are quite good, they mow down everyone in the round. This is not enjoyable for those who are in these performance brackets either.
Developers have no power over the features
This is what a former developer says: Michael Condrey, the co-founder of Sledgehammer Games, one of the studios responsible for Call of Duty, has now spoken up about this on Twitter. According to him, the developers at Infinity Ward have no say in the matter. The decision lies solely with Activision:
Ask ATVI. Never directed into COD from me. Analytics, SB match making, monetization, dedi server coverage, etc all driven from ATVI central tech and production teams. Fustratingly little influence on those corp decisions despite their impact on our games and the COD community.
— Michael Condrey (@MichaelCondrey) March 27, 2020
Condrey himself has acted as Director for CoD: Advanced Warfare and WWII. In both cases, he says he was not responsible for SBMM. It always came from Activision.
Where does Activision still have decision-making power? Condrey adds that matchmaking is not the only feature over which Activision has decision-making authority. Monetization and dedicated server coverage are also the publisher’s responsibility.
This would mean that Activision is responsible for how much the battle passes cost, what you have to pay for and how smoothly the rounds run on the server side. Developers have “frustratingly little influence” over such decisions.
- Matchmaking is apparently a particularly sore point. The “Black Ops” chief made a joke about it and quickly regretted it.
- This would also explain why the developers remain stubbornly silent on matchmaking.
By the way, it looks like Activision is bringing the entire Modern Warfare series back as remastered: Leak says: Not only CoD MW2 – Also Modern Warfare 3 is coming back as remastered
